32 A RE-POR TE-R A T LARGE- GR.eCIAN CALENDAR. I-A THENS N OT long ago, I spent a year In Greece, lnak- ing Athens my center of operatIons while occasional- ly travelling about the country or staying for a while at some spot in its outlying regions. To reach Athens, I could have flown direct from New York, but flying is much the same everywhere. I could also have got there from 'V\r estern Eu- rope by either train or car through Yugoslavia, but while this offers some gorgeous scen- ery, the going is slow and, if one is driving, rough into the bargaIn. Anyhow, I favored a sea approach, which to me seemed the most fitting, be- cause in a senSe Greece is an amphibious nation, consisting of what are sometimes referred to as Dry Greece (the main- land) and \\' et Greece ( the many islands, which have been nourishing the national life SInce before the time of Ulysses). Ha ving selected the town of Brindisi, on the lower east coast of Italy, dS my jumping-off point, I journeyed there and, late one] anuary afternoon, boarded the Greek ship An- gelIka, a statel} vessel built in Glasgow almost half a century before and full of old reddish-brown panelling and l1lonumental plumbing. The Angelika sailed at dusk and headed southeast dcross the Adriatic bound for Piraeus, with several scheduled island stops along the way. At dawn the next day, I rose to find that we were off the coast of Albania and nearing Corfu, the north- ernmost of Greece's Ionian Islands. Long, low, black, dnd sharply outlined, it lay silhouetted against a cloudy hori- zon that was tinged with red frolTI the rising sun, while overhead there were stars still visible In a clear, pale-blue sky. The i\ngelika docked at Corfu, where her passengers-a mixed lot of tourists and busInessmen of various nationalities,.--were cleared by Greek customs officials. By midmorning, when we put to sea again and began sailing south along the Greek coast, the open deck space that constituted the Angelika's third-class accommodations was teeming with passengers of an en- tirely different sort-part of the multi- tude of peasants, of both sexes and all way, with its flanking electric lights. By the time we elnerged from it into the Aegean èa, the dawn spread out clearly be- fore us, pink and green, and the roosters in third class \vere crowIng. The canal is both narrow 2nd shallow, being geared to the cozy scale of domestic shipping and incapable of handling the generally larger vessels of for- eign shippers, who sometInles complain that it is delIberately limited to its present width anu depth to keep them out of Greek waters. Foreign boats are not actually banned fronl the canal, and I have seen a few Italian and Turkish ones-unusually small, by the standards of their nations-passing through It, hut their captains may well have been grumbling, for alien craft that meet the canal's specifica- tions are said to suffer unreason- able delays while cOlnplying with regulations rigged against them by the Greek authorities. Such complaints are commonplace wherever one ndtion controls a vital maritime passage, but the point here is one of size. The canal is small, Greek ships are snlall, the Aegean is small, the islands in it are sinall, and all of then1 exist in a small world of their own, whose true capital, in the minds of many of this world's inhabitants, is Piraeus, which is also small. In fact, to the eye of a hasty tourist impatient to move on to Athens, Piraeus seems hardly more than a minia- ture Hoboken, yet to large nUlnbers of people in Wet Greece the nation's of- ficial capital is a mere shadow of Piraeus. II ages, who are forever moving dbout on the shipping lanes of "r et GreecL, carry- ing with them all sorts of things, in- cluding sacks, baskets, chickens, and demijohns of wine. (The chickens are usually cooped up in crates when they are brought aboard, but their owners soon let them loose-for exercise, I sup- pose-and they scramble about the decks along with the peasants' children. ) One of two or three bnef stops we made that afternoon, without going ashore, was at Ithaca, the home of Ulysses-a hard, rocky little island, with much character but with little aspect of cOIn fort about it. Even when it is mere- ly glimpsed from a boat in the harbor, Ithaca makes one sympathize both with the wanderer's expressed longing to re- turn to it and with his delaying ten years before doing so. That night, we turned east into the Gulf of Corinth, which cuts the Greek penInsula almost in two, and at dawn we sighted the Corinth Canal, a ditch dug in the nineteenth centur} to sever the Isthmus of Corinth-the narrow link between the northern mainland and the great bulge of the Peloponnesus to the south. The hint of dawn that had been visible in the east as We approached the canal was dimmed when we entered the steep-walled water- P IRAEUS stands at the southern ex- tremIty of the so-called Athenian plain, which, lying in the heart of the diminutive promontory of Attica and centering around Athens, stretches gently upward for about fifteen miles to the foothills of four mountains- lVlount Aegaleos, on the west, Mount Parnes and Mount PentelIkon, on the north and the northeast, respectively, and, finally, Mount Hymettus, famous for its hone v, on the east. B} the time we docked at Piraeus, it was a good sunny mornIng, and I had a fine vie,,? of this landscape as I rode in a taxi from Piraeus, through Athens, to Kifissia, a